Meteorite Market Report 2026

We are over half way through 2026. As I sit writing this, it is exactly one year to the day that I wrote the last market report. The last year has been an interesting one in the world of meteorites and I want to talk about some of that.

You can read the previous market reports here :

Meteorite Market Report 2025 : https://galactic-stone.com/galactic-stone-archive/meteorite-market-report-2025/

Meteorite Market Report 2022 : https://galactic-stone.com/galactic-stone-archive/meteorite-market-analysis-2022/

SAFFORDITE, CINTAMANI, MOLDAVITE :

Last year I wrote about the widespread appearance of suspect "saffordite" and "cintamani" glass being sold on multiple online venues like Etsy, eBay, and social media. This material continues to proliferate and the market is now flooded with it. I still have accounts on some of those old sites like Etsy and eBay, so I went undercover and contacted some of the sellers. I posed as a curious buyer and asked several questions unrelated to provenance before slipping in an innocent inquiry about where the pieces were sourced. I didn't come across like I was trying to muscle in on their source and cut them out. Instead, I was just curious about various aspects of the material, including what country it came from. The answers, or lack thereof, said a lot.

Most sellers were quick to respond to questions about shipping, so it was clear that a human was there to answer inquiries. I could ask if they combined shipping on multiple items and get a very quick answer. But if I asked if the specimens came from China, those same sellers suddenly clammed up and ghosted me. I asked if a piece had certain metaphysical properties and got a fast answer. If I asked anything about the chain of provenance behind the item, I got silence or open hostility. One big eBay seller of crystals and metaphysical items basically told me to go screw myself and not look at their store any more. That kind of unwarranted hostility towards reasonable questions should be a big red flag to any potential buyer.

That big eBay crystal seller who told me to buzz off was also selling suspect moldavite that bears mentioning. The "moldavite" looked correct in some ways. It had random organic shapes that seemed right. The color was correct and what you would expect. It didn't have that obvious "apple green" or beer-bottle-green look to it like earlier moldavite fakes did when they first appeared on the market many years ago. Even the surface texture was roughly correct. Notice I said "roughly correct''. The linear etching caused by terrestrial weathering is just one part of the texture and look of genuine moldavite. The etchings are the squiggly lines and pits on the surface. Real moldavite also has tiny air bubbles in it (both inside and on the surface) from when the material was in a molten state shortly after the impact that created it. In genuine moldavite, these bubbles are distorted and warped. They are not uniform in shape, size, or distribution in the specimens. In suspect "moldavite" the bubbles are often very round, perfect little spheres and can be more crowded and numerous than what is seen in authentic material. This is because the real material was created under the catastrophic velocity and pressure of a massive meteorite impact and such forces cannot be faked by man. The resulting bubbles look different. It just didn't look right, but it looked close. The asking prices were pretty low for that "moldavite" as well. If the deal seems too good then you how that goes.

METEORITE RINGS :

While researching bogus saffordite and moldavite on the major auction sites, I stumbled across something else problematic. So-called "meteorite rings" are all over the place. I'm not talking about the expensive handmade ones that have been on the market for years. I am referring to the mass-produced rings that are not solid meteorite, but are a base metal of some kind with a "band" of meteorite shavings or chips sealed under epoxy or clear acrylic. Most of the actual ring is tungsten, titanium, aluminum, or steel and there might be a nickel's worth of iron meteorite shavings contained in a small band that runs around the ring at the center. Other gimmicks are sometimes included, such as a second band of semi-precious stone, dinosaur bone, or other exotic-sounding materials. The vast majority of these rings look the same and there are countless thousands flooding the market. It's obvious they are being mass-produced in industrial fashion.

I did some more searching around and found these same rings on Temu, Shein, Wish, and Ali Baba - all Chinese shopping portals. Some were selling for as low as $1 to $2 each, and those same rings are being marked up to $100 to $250 each by greedy sellers. To add insult to injury, I suspect the "meteorite" in most of these rings is fake. It might even be a printed photo strip under the sealant for all we know. I've even seen some with suspect-looking Widmanstatten patterns that don't exist in real life, running along a thick band that is supposed to be worked iron meteorite magically bonded to titanium or some such. It's silly that people fall for this, but some sellers are (un)knowingly mixing these fakes in with their legitimate offerings to further muddy the waters.

My advice is this : if you want a genuine meteorite ring, seek out a real bonafide jeweler or meteorite dealer who specializes in meteorite jewelry. Don't buy it from some random marketplace seller and expect to get a real meteorite ring for $100 or $50 or $5.

IRONS :

Iron prices continue to climb from last year. The differences between last year and this year are not that big, so I won't linger long on irons this time around. Suffice to say, if you can find a stable iron for under a buck per gram, then buy it. Of course, finding one in that price range is getting harder every year. It's not unusual to see B-grade Sikhote Alins going for $10 a gram. Prices will never go back to normal once this becomes the new normal. Even the once-cheap and very common Chinese Aletai iron is rarely seen for less than $2/g now.

NEW FALLS :

We've had eight new meteorite falls since I wrote the last market report. Five of those have been officially classified. Most were not big attention-grabbing events. Do you remember the Tana River fall in Kenya on Christmas Eve of last year? Yeah, well I don't either, so don't feel bad. We did get a few worth mentioning. In March of this year, we had a run of three meteorite falls : a hammer in Germany, a hammer in Texas, and a eucrite fall in Ohio.

In last year's report, I was pointing out the ever-increasing premium being applied to new US falls. New falls went from about $50/g twenty years ago, to about $100-$150 for several years, and then suddenly a jump to $250+ per gram for ordinary chondrite falls that aren't hammers. The Wadsworth Ohio fall debuted around $2k/g and is still fetching north of a $1k per gram. Granted, that one is an achondrite (eucrite), but I still find that price to be very steep for what it is and the circumstances of the fall. The Germany and Texas falls still aren't widely available for private collectors, but when small pieces do surface, the prices are truly astronomical. Realistically, these fall prices can't keep going up indefinitely. Sellers can ask whatever they want, but there are reasonable limits to what many collectors can afford or are willing to pay.

PLANETARIES :

The market for planetaries remains largely unchanged from last year. It's still a buyer's market for lunars, so enjoy this dip in the prices to grow your collection. Let me know if you need a larger lunar for display or outreach because I can get some really good deals on large specimens. I just don't keep the big stuff in stock regularly.

Martians and Vestans are still being offered at around the same price ranges as last year and we still don't have an official Mercury-origin meteorite yet.

NWA BARGAIN BIN :

Well, I must have jinxed it. The asking prices for unclassified Saharan stones has climbed since last year. Some sellers are regularly asking $2 to $5/g for decent specimens with remnant fusion crust or desert varnish. Anything that isn't completely sandblasted is being marketed as "fresh" or "fusion crusted", despite being obviously W2 or worse in weathering grade. Of course, not every dealer is guilty of this, but it's becoming more common with the newer dealers to just start their prices out high and go from there.

Also, don't forget, while not technically in the NWA dense collection area, the Libyan and Omani stones are just as good as the NWA ones coming out of Morocco. You can still get cheap deals on Jiddat al Harasis, Hamada al Hamra, and Dhofar specimens if you can find them. Look for common chondrites from these dense collection areas in Libya and Oman, because the lunars and Martians from these places fetch a premium. The rare types from these regions are just as pricey as their Moroccan counterparts, so keep your eyes peeled for the "boring" stuff like H5's and L6's.

One last thing that bears mentioning : there are some cheap common chondrites coming out of the deserts of South America (Atacama) and China (Gobi). These are not as widely available yet, but they are appearing in greater numbers in the new approvals coming out of the Meteoritical Bulletin. Lots of new approvals in the Met Bull usually is a sign of availability for collectors. I've previously sold some Atacama material (from the same source I got my Pica Glass from), but I have yet to get my hands on any Gobi material because I am highly suspect of anything meteorite-related coming out of China right now. Until the Chinese deal with their endemic fraud problem, I'm not touching it.

METEORITE A.I. :

I talked about the impact of AI (artificial intelligence) on the meteorite market in my last report, and unfortunately things have gotten worse since then. Just for shits and giggles, I went to the AI built into the popular Brave web browser that I use and typed in the following query : "current state of the meteorite market". The results were not good.

First, let me state that Brave's browser is just a reskinned and tweaked version of the Chromium browser engine that Google's Chrome is built on. Likewise, Brave's AI assistant is named Leo and it's just Google's Gemini with a mask on it. So, you will probably get the same or similar results directly from Google, or ChatGPT, or whatever AI app you use because they all train on the same source material.

The summary answer was not terrible at first glance. The first paragraph was mostly correct and also sounded very familiar. So I clicked on the little link icon with the summary to see the sources. Bam, there I was. My Meteorite Market Reports from 2022 and 2025 were both linked as sources. After that, the AI's answer started to go off the rails. As I continued to the rest of the summarized answer (complete with expanded bullet points) it was clear that the AI had gotten quite a bit of the information wrong. Some was correct and some was very obviously wrong. When I clicked on the other link icons for sources, I saw some other blogs and websites that I had never heard of and most of them had nothing to do with meteorites. These were generic finance and investment blog sites with AI-generated slop articles about collecting and valuating meteorites.

One slop article fabricated an entire meteorite grading system that doesn't exist. Another contained misinformation about classifying and authenticating meteorites. Still others gave very poor suggestions and reference info (complete with charts and graphics) that was very, very, very wrong. A lot of it was complete and total horseshit.

It wasn't all bad. A few of the linked sources were good accurate articles, but they were old and dated as far back as 2012. The older articles were mostly good, but the newer sources were AI-generated. To confirm my suspicions, I copy-pasted samples of the text into an AI Detector on the web and every single one I tested was slop.

When you ask AI about meteorites, you may get some accurate info, or you may get total bullshit. You and I are hard to fool and we know our space rocks, so the obvious errors are very obvious. But, a newbie or someone who is not well-read on the science of meteorites will quickly get overwhelmed with useless wrong information.

Even when AI got it right, my source link appeared next to summarized sentences that didn't always accurately reflect what I wrote in those reports. It runs the risk of making me look bad by association because my name and link is displayed next to bullshit info. I don't like it, but there's really nothing I can do about it because those big AI companies don't respect consent, intellectual property, or the law in general. Even if I try to block them from crawling my website, they'll just steal the information anyway. I'd say what I really think, but I want to keep this close to family-friendly in tone.

If you must use AI for meteorites (or anything at all), just be sure you double-check anything it spits out and take it with a big grain of salt.

GROWING THE METEORITE WORLD ON MASTODON :

When I first opened Facebook and Twitter accounts back in early 2009, it was great. Feed-control algorithms wouldn't exist for a few years and the billionaire CEO's hadn't been outed as soulless ghouls yet. You could post a meteorite on those sites and people would see it. It was new and I was one of the first wave of meteorite dealers who built presences on Facebook. For a little while, it was a nice complement to other watering holes like the Met-List, SkyRock Cafe, and other independent forums where collectors and dealers talked shop. Well, then greed took over at the big venues and algorithms were invented to maximize attention and profits for the corporate owners of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. People got shadowbanned for opaque reasons and those places became "Pay to Play" - you either paid for sponsored posts/ads or nobody saw your posts. In time, these sites got so big and so powerful that they literally destroyed all the competing venues outside their control. As we sit today, the Met-List is gone and so are the vast majority of public venues to discuss meteorites without Mark Zuckerberg looking over your shoulder and taking his cut.

Back around 2020, social media became too toxic for me to bear, I decided to pull the plug on those sites. I deleted my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I never looked back and I don't miss them, but I do miss some of the meteorite collectors and dealers that I lost touch with. Despite my pleadings to join me in breaking out of the walled corporate gardens, many folks decided to remain on those sites exclusively, so they never got to stumble upon Mastodon like I did.

I'm not gonna go into length on Mastodon because that would be another article in itself. But I will say that Mastodon is a lot like very early Twitter, both in looks/interface and general vibe. It's a lot kinder and gentler on average and generally more civilized and better-moderated than the big sites like Facebook. Frankly, there's not nearly as many assholes (but the number is never zero!) and there are no algorithms controlling what you see. There's a lot of older folks, Linux people, and refugees from big corporate social media on Mastodon, and many of them collect meteorites. Ok, not a lot compared to someplace like Facebook, but more than you'd think at first glance. The problem is that it is hard for like-minded people to find each other on Mastodon because there are no groups like Facebook. But, Mastodon does have hashtags and a new feature called "Collections" that make things a little easier. Collections functions like Lists on Twitter or Groups in Facebook. It's actually not like either, but the intent is the same - to allow people with similar interests to find each other more easily.

As I was one of the first to start a meteorite group on Facebook, I am now the first to make a meteorite "collection" on Mastodon. It is still very very small with just three prospective members and myself. The hope is to grow it into a viable watering hole for people on Mastodon who are interested in meteorites and the adjacent scientific fields of meteoritics, planetary science, and geology. If you are reading this and would like to find out more about registering an account on Mastodon or how to find the "Meteorite Collection" there, please email me at galacticstone@protonmail.com.

SUMMARY OF TRENDS :

This is already over 2500 words, so let's wrap this up before it becomes a ramble.

Prices for irons, pallasites, new falls, and moldavite continue to climb beyond the historical rate of appreciation.

Prices on ordinary desert chondrites are starting to rise, but remain a good deal.

Prices on lunar remain low and will probably stay that way in the near future due to plentiful supply.

Meteorite jewelry can be risky. Big corporate venues like eBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace are minefields of fraud and should be treated with caution. As always, know your seller. If you know the seller, you are fine. If not, buyer beware and trust your instincts.

...

The world is a crazier place than last year. Inflation is skyrocketing and a lot can happen in another year. So, here's to hoping that the next market report will be interesting and worth waiting for. (* fingers crossed for mostly good stuff to happen! *)

Take care and keep looking up at the stars and down at the meteorites on the ground!